If you've been holding out faithfully, hoping for new Planetside 2 stuff, your time is almost at hand. Next month, the free-to-play MMOFPS is getting its first major update in seven years. Expedition: Oshur, originally announced way back in August 2018, adds a new "full-featured water system" that will enable combat on, and beneath, the sea.
"Rarely do we get to deliver players an entirely new combat space, and it’s been years since a playspace has been created at this scale,” Planetside 2 lead designer Michael Henderson said. "The team has done some amazing work bringing this to fruition, and I think our players are really going to dig it."
The continent of Oshur will first appear in Planetside 2 in the storyline of a two-part campaign set to begin on November 17, the game's ninth anniversary. Completing missions and challenges will lead players to a "forgotten paradise island" that was abandoned in the early days of the war.
The second part of the campaign will kick off in early December (an exact date hasn't been announced) and will open the continent—actually a series of resource-rich islands—to players, who will have the opportunity to earn in-game rewards including new underwater weapons and cosmetics throughout the entire campaign.
There's not much to see at this point, but there's definitely some submerged scenery going on:
The big update comes amidst a rather muddled situation for Planetside as a whole. Developer Daybreak Games confirmed a sequel, Planetside 3, in October 2019, saying that it would be connected to its predecessor by Planetside Arena, an MMO-battle royale that entered Early Access in August 2019 after multiple delays. But Arena tanked badly, and Daybreak pulled the plug just five months later, in January 2020.
Around the same time, Daybreak announced a new business structure that saw it establish "three new individual creative franchise studios," one for each of its three games: The Planetside series went to Rogue Planet Games, which said it "will be working to craft even more new and unique experiences in the space under Executive Producer Andy Sites at the helm."
Sites departed Rogue Planet Games a year later, saying that he was "excited for the future of PlanetSide - especially knowing what the team has planned for 2021 and beyond." He made no specific mention of Planetside 3 in his farewell message, however.
I've reached out to Daybreak to ask about the state of the sequel and will update if I receive a reply. You can learn more about the Expedition: Oshur expansion at planetside2.com.
